Hazard of New Fortunes, a — Complete eBook

“Not on any account. I want to see the
whole list of flats that Mr. Fulkerson thought would
be the very thing for us.” She laughed,
but with a certain bitterness.

“You’ll be calling him my Mr. Fulkerson
next, Isabel.”

“Oh no!”

The fourth address was a furnished flat without a
kitchen, in a house with a general restaurant.
The fifth was a furnished house. At the sixth
a pathetic widow and her pretty daughter wanted to
take a family to board, and would give them a private
table at a rate which the Marches would have thought
low in Boston.

Mrs. March came away tingling with compassion for
their evident anxiety, and this pity naturally soured
into a sense of injury. “Well, I must say
I have completely lost confidence in Mr. Fulkerson’s
judgment. Anything more utterly different from
what I told him we wanted I couldn’t imagine.
If he doesn’t manage any better about his business
than he has done about this, it will be a perfect
failure.”

“Well, well, let’s hope he’ll be
more circumspect about that,” her husband returned,
with ironical propitiation. “But I don’t
think it’s Fulkerson’s fault altogether.
Perhaps it’s the house-agents’. They’re
a very illusory generation. There seems to be
something in the human habitation that corrupts the
natures of those who deal in it, to buy or sell it,
to hire or let it. You go to an agent and tell
him what kind of a house you want. He has no
such house, and he sends you to look at something
altogether different, upon the well-ascertained principle
that if you can’t get what you want you will
take what you can get. You don’t suppose
the ‘party’ that took our house in Boston
was looking for any such house? He was looking
for a totally different kind of house in another part
of the town.”

“I don’t believe that!” his wife
broke in.

“Well, no matter. But see what a scandalous
rent you asked for it.”

“We didn’t get much more than half; and,
besides, the agent told me to ask fourteen hundred.”

“Well, I don’t believe he told them just
what we wanted; and, at any rate, I’m done with
agents. Tomorrow I’m going entirely by
advertisements.”

VIII.

Mrs. March took the vertebrate with her to the Vienna
Coffee-House, where they went to breakfast next morning.
She made March buy her the Herald and the World, and
she added to its spiny convolutions from them.
She read the new advertisements aloud with ardor and
with faith to believe that the apartments described
in them were every one truthfully represented, and
that any one of them was richly responsive to their
needs. “Elegant, light, large, single and
outside flats” were offered with “all
improvements—­bath, ice-box, etc.”—­for
twenty-five to thirty dollars a month. The cheapness